my solid fuel forges and coal

[the iron dwarf]

mostly we used coke until recently with nothing but a little sand lining the bottom of the forge but as it is harder to get here now we have switched to coal and are using a bituminous coal mostly and sometimes some welsh steam coal.

we needed to reduce the size of the fire a bit so we added some hard fire bricks just over 3" deep, forge is 6" deep in total

it seems to be working well so I thought I would post it here

2 pix of my forge with no lining at all then some pix of adding bricks and lighting it with charcoal and then onto fresh coal.

we coke the coal and gradually move it into the firepot

pix of forge we added bricks to are by john who wanted to try this to see if it worked better and it does, we can now supply bricks with forges if people want

the firebricks we used were from old storage heaters as we can get these, they have been in use most days since the start of the year